


Most Nights I Don't Know

by Katherine



Category: The Giver - Lois Lowry
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 05:15:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12976782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: Asher was newly a Twelve. The Chief Elder had thanked him for his childhood. He had an Assignment that would be his as an adult in his community. Yet he didn't feel so very different from this morning, before his Ceremony.





	Most Nights I Don't Know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Meltha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meltha/gifts).



Asher was newly a Twelve. The Chief Elder had thanked him for his childhood. He had an Assignment that would be his as an adult in his community. Yet he didn't feel so very different from this morning, before his Ceremony.

There would be less leeway to forget rules, now. Asher liked rules, the certainty of them a comfort. Everything fell under the rules. The major rules of the community were the simplest to follow. More difficult were the smaller rules of conduct. To not draw attention to differences. To use language precisely. To take one's pill against stirrings every morning.

Asher would forget to wheel his bicycle tidily into a port, when he hurried or was distracted, which was often. But when he forgot that rule or another, the outcome had a certainty also. One of his parents would remind him, or Jonas or Fiona or another of his peers whisper a hint. Or at worst, an announcement would be made. Being chastised for forgetting was not the worst consequence to him; it was correct. Another kind of learning followed forgetting.

*

Through his childhood Asher had inevitably been aware of the siblings of other children in his year-group. Mostly from seeing them around the community, as the others (particularly Jonas) had, delicately, avoided mentioning this difference in family unit.

This year as an Eleven (last year, he corrected himself, now that all the Ceremonies were done) with Phillipa toddling about at home, Asher himself had been careful. He had succeeded in quiet on the topic of siblings to the two girls who, like him, remained the only children in a family unit for an unusually long time. Even with the one he was most close to, as there were plenty of other topics to share with Fiona. Their schoolwork, their games, and some of their volunteer hours had been shared. 

This first night of Asher being a Twelve it was nearing time for sleep. Phillipa had been handed her comfort object, called "whale", and now (as usual) had part of it in her mouth. Its tail, Asher realised, putting together the near-sameness of the shape with that of a fish, which were real. "Tail" was a difficult concept, like animal. Fish had tails. Was the imaginary creature whale, then, a kind of fish? It was a very strange idea, abstract, and Asher shook it off, much preferring the solidity of his actual life and community.

"Whale is short," Asher's mother pointed out, with a small smile that she turned from her daughter to Asher. "Easy for a child to say. Not like yours was!" She said it brightly, but Asher remembered the frustration inside him when he had been much younger. The phrase "comfort object" or the name of his own had been too difficult to say.

"Ra!" he had tried at home, all those years before. It had that dreadful time when he had been silent at school, too afraid of making a mistake in his language there and receiving the discipline wand. He had spoken a little to his parents, then, but not often.

On the day he managed "Raccoon" his father smiled widely and handed his comfort object down from its shelf. Asher had hugged it to him, then. He remembered a dawning idea that precision of language could be a power to make things happen. He called his comfort object by name and got to hold it. Indulged, for a comfort object was supposed to stay on the shelf during the day time, only to be held at night.

In his sleepingroom, Asher had petted at his comfort object, his raccoon. He must have been a Seven, nearing an age to have to give up his comfort object, that he realised it had been some other child's in the community before it was his. It had been patched sometime before coming to him, like bicycles were sometimes repaired and had a lighter place or a seam that didn't quite match. His raccoon, had a darker patch on its front, and three ringing its opposite pointy end.

Dimly, looking back, Asher thought that it was strange (yet within the rules) that in a community focused on Sameness, on not mentioning differences, that each child younger than Eight had their own, different comfort object to hold at night.

His comfort object had been unique to him in a way that nothing else in his childhood was. But it had been another child's before Asher, and must have been again once he was past the age of being allowed it. So even this that had been unique to him became part of the Sameness in his community.

*

The recreation worker wasn't actually an instructor. Not precisely. But Asher thought of her as one, because she was teaching him. In this stage of Asher's having been Assigned as an assistant recreation director, he had a lot to learn.

This afternoon's task was a difficult one: to think of a new game. It didn't need to be completely new, the instructor said. She nodded after that statement, as if to silently encourage Asher that of course one couldn't go making up something entirely new. But it could be a variation on a game he had already played or seen.

He was supposed to consider how many children could play at once, and when to take turns, and what different parts of the game should be called.

Games were important. Even the youngest children, the Ones and before them the newchildren that were not yet placed in family units, played games of a sort. When Asher volunteered at the Nurturing Centre (watching Jonas shyly not watch his own father), he had helped the Nurturers play very simple games.

One was "hug the teddy". That was a name that wasn't precise, because it was encouraging a child to hug his or her comfort object. Asher's parents had played that with Phillipa when she was younger. They could have replaced the nonsense name with whale. The whale that was shaped very like a fish.

Asher's thoughts were wandering, so he tried to connect with his task. A game often included some form of pretending. It would be silly to pretend to be a fish. Like pretending to be a carrot, or an apple. Fish were for eating. But they did move, because they had tails.

One person could pretend to be a fish, moving around, while the others stayed still trying to hide. The ones being still could pretend to be something that didn't move. Something that it might make sense to have fallen into the water, a leaf or a flower. Or a rock that could be already there. He gradually imagined a game of pretending.

After he explained his idea, he didn't expect praise. Only acknowledgement. But from the instructor's slight frown Asher could see he had (not on purpose) done something wrong.

"Asher," the instructor said gently, "You worked hard on this. But there is an important factor for you to know. Games shouldn't be about something real."

*

Months later, less than two weeks to the Ceremonies that marked the end of the year, Asher was left with a different context to what was real. So these were memories. These intruding, utterly unfamiliar not-Sameness were what Jonas had endured in his training. Of course Jonas had become stranger and more distant, over this past year since his Selection as Receiver.

Jonas being gone had to do with what was amiss, somehow.

The memories were present and yet not real, not the way a true event or even one's own memories were. They were... Asher reached for a simile, a type of language rarely used in the community. These new memories were wisps, like steam curling up from a delivered meal.

Asher had been proud of his new authority on recreation, shaking off Jonas's complaints at a game called war. Asher himself had hazy memories of war, now. No one had told him the name; no one was speaking at all of these memories. Yet Asher knew. He had memories of fighting, of a battlefield. Memories of dying in incomprehensible pain for impossible causes.

He was not allowed to speak of these memories that had come upon him, intruding in the daytime and in his dreams. The telling of feelings each evening had been suspended.

It was unsettling for there to be an announcement as soon as family units were awake. More so that the speaker, usually such a calm voice, had an uncertainty under her words. Still, it was a direction: go about one's tasks in the community for half of the day, then attend an unscheduled announcement in the afternoon.

There was a pause long enough for Asher to think it was time to begin his day as usual before the same speaker added: "All parents and children over Three in family units. You are to refrain from dreamtelling."

Phillipa was a Two, and until she became a Three, at the next Ceremony, was too young for dreamtelling. But that neither of his parents could speak of their dreams, if they'd dreamed, and that Asher himself could not, was a break in his familiar routine. It felt as though the rules had been changed. His dreams were full of the memories.

*

That afternoon when he arrived to attend the unscheduled ceremony, Asher set his bicycle upright in one of the ports. Being uncharacteristically careful of the very small rules soothed him now. So much was strange.

Each person was to sit in his or her Assigned work-group, not in a family unit. Asher found himself wondering if the scheduled two-day Ceremonies would happen as they should. Further strangeness would be more unsettling. Wasn't it a rule that Ceremonies were important and needed to happen when scheduled?

Asher was still restless with that idea when the Chief Elder introduced the Receiver to the community. It was the Receiver who led an unexplained, brief ceremony of Loss for Jonas. 

Jonas was gone. The Receiver did not speak of why. He did not say if Jonas had died, or left, or been released to Elsewhere,

The Receiver's pale eyes were gleaming, as if he had been crying. But only very young children cried.

The whole community whispered the name, quieter and quieter each time. Jonas. They did not speak the name of the newchild that had gone from the community along with him. That child had been Jonas's sibling, in a way. A family unit had only two children. But a child in one's family unit was a sibling, and the newchild had been in Jonas's family unit... an exception to the rules.

Asher's own family unit was as one should be, after the later-than-most addition of his sister. His mother and father, his sister, himself. Exactly how many a family unit should have, and tonight he would again be in their home with them. The rest of the community around him. Except the one person missing, who had been his closest friend.

As he whispered "Jonas" for the last time, Asher felt ahead of him the need to adjust to the loss of Jonas, and to the stranger addition of memories. He had to learn these differences without rules to follow, or forget.


End file.
